The Henry Clay Frick Business Records contains material reflecting the business and financial activities of Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) with particular
relevance to Pittsburgh and the western Pennsylvania region. These materials highlight Frick's ascent into prominence during a period of American industrial growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The resources range from Frick's first
businesses, including his first coal firm, H.C. Frick & Company, to correspondence between Frick and Andrew Carnegie, which also includes Frick's negotiations that facilitated the mega merger that formed United States Steel Corporation in 1899. The material
also addresses aspects of business specific to the late ninetieth century coke industry, including bituminous coal mining, beehive ovens, and railroad transportation. The Helen Clay Frick Foundation Archives contains 28 series that date from 1881 to 1987; the
majority of the materials date from 1881 to 1914, when Frick was most active in the coal and steel industry in Pittsburgh. The majority of the material is categorized into four types of records: administrative material, financial records, legal material, and
ephemeral items. The administrative material are generally made up of correspondence, letterpress copybooks, memoranda, invoices, company charters, meeting minutes, by-laws, deeds, contracts, certificates, pamphlets, proposals, specifications, labor costs,
property assessments, building construction records, architectural drawings, blue prints, newspaper clipping scrapbooks, atlases, and plat maps. The financial records consist of receipts, reports, statements, stock accounts, taxes, bills, lease matters, rent and
building costs, cashbooks, sales journals, accounts payable receipts, mortgages, estate/property values, as well as profit and loss statements. There is a small amount of legal material which has records of court cases, case notes, court rulings, and attorney
services. The ephemera items include keys, stone samples, printing plates, and post cards. Further description is available at the series and subseries level., Henry Clay Frick Business Records, 1862-1987, AIS.2002.06, Archives Service Center, University of
Pittsburgh., Deposit; Helen Clay Frick Foundation; 2002., Industrialist and art patron, Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), was born in West Overton, Pennsylvania. His grandfather,
Abraham Overholt, owner of the Overholt farm and distillery, was a respected figure in his small village. Frick's future economic gains would be tied in part to the location of his family's homestead. The Overholt farm was situated in the middle of the Pittsburgh
Coal seam in the coal rich Connellsville region of Fayette County, Pa. At the age of 21, Frick realized the potential of the local bituminous coal and borrowed money to form a partnership, Frick & Company, a coal and coke producing firm. The newly-formed
business used beehive ovens and blast furnaces to turn coal into coke, a fuel product that was in great demand by the growing steel industry in Pittsburgh. This was a highly successful venture and Frick soon controlled eighty percent of the coke output of
Pennsylvania. During a financial panic in 1873, Frick seized the opportunity to buy out competitors, ally himself with the powerful Andrew Carnegie, and ensured a steady business by supplying his many steel companies. By 1879 at the age of thirty, Frick had made
himself a millionaire. Eventually, Carnegie brought Frick into Carnegie Brothers & Company, making him chairman. As Chairman, Frick quickly reorganized all of Carnegie's industrial firms and created the world's largest coke and steel company under the name
Carnegie Steel Company. Although business was booming, tension began to grow between the two industrialists and came to a breaking point with the labor strike at the Homestead Works, part of Carnegie Steel Company. Frick was criticized for causing the death and
carnage that arose from the strike, which directly lead to an assassination attempt on his life by Alexander Berkman and Berkman's companion, Emma Goldman. Frick survived the attack, making a full recovery, but as the years went on, he continued to have countless
disputes with Carnegie, which eventually resulted in Frick's resignation in 1899. In the early 1900s, Frick expanded his interests and built a large coke and steel plant in Clairton, Pa. called St. Clair Steel Company, while simultaneously investing in mining
firms in West Virginia, Colorado, Wyoming, and in central Peru. Frick also made several major real estate investments in downtown Pittsburgh, financing building projects which included the Frick Building, Frick Annex, William Penn Hotel and Union Arcade. Frick
moved his family, including wife Adelaide and two other children, Childs and Helen Clay, to New York, where they spent the first ten years living in a Vanderbilt mansion on Fifth Avenue. Frick left a fortune of nearly $50,000,000, with more than eighty percent of
the amount being donated to charitable organizations. In Frick's later life, he made many charitable contributions to both New York City and Pittsburgh. Frick and his daughter, Helen Clay, were avid patrons of the arts and over the years amassed a famed
collection of early Renaissance and eighteenth century French paintings and furniture, as well as some nineteenth and twentieth century English pieces. Frick was a strong believer in the arts and education, so much so that he commissioned a fund to supplement
educational opportunities for public school teachers in Pittsburgh. The fund was made permanent in 1916, and known as the Henry Clay Frick Educational Commission. In addition Frick would also provide many individual grants for special training to prospective
teachers.

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